Living in America: The open road will be closing

America is all about superhighways, stretching coast to coast, making it easy to get anywhere you want to get.

The superhighway of the future is the Trans Texas Corridor, a boondoggle of a screw-up that the governor, a San Antonio engineering company, foreign investors, several trucking firms and some chamber of commerce guys are trying to shove down our throats.

Locally, they want to turn parts of all of the major highways — U.S. 281, Loop 1604, and Bandera Road, among them — into toll roads.

It’s a bad idea. Terri Hall leads the local opposition to the project, which is picking up speed on the freeway of grass roots movement.

“It’s all smoke and mirrors,” she says of the plan, adding “It’s absolute fiscal mismanagement to the point of fraud.”

A complicated story

There are two sides to the fight against the TTC. One is grounded, in my opinion, in reality. The other, in my opinion, isn’t.

I can’t write about the anti-TTC arguments that make sense without first writing about the stuff that doesn’t make sense. Bear with me.

Hall is upfront, when laying out the case of the Toll Party against the TTC, that much of it sounds odd.

“Our failed trade polices are behind it,” she says, explaining the motivation to build the road. “And the other thing we can’t overlook — and this where people accuse us of being conspiracy theorists and black helicopters people — is the North American Union.”

More than just bad highway

Hall is referring to the tri-lateral agreement, between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada, that’s being sold as a plan to remove trade barriers and stimulate the economies of all three nations. But there are a lot of people in all three countries that see the plan as a way to form a big European Union-style, North American country at the expense of each country’s independence.

The TTC is part of a well-orchestrated plan, Hall says, to make money for a select few and throw the United State’s sovereignty to the wolves. The toll roads, by privatizing the highway system, will help move American wealth overseas in the name of free trade. Multi-national corporations, above the law and without loyalty to any country, will be the prime beneficiaries. We will be the ones who suffer.

Hall has done her research and all of the elements of her contentions are in place. She doesn’t care what critics say.

“It’s an argument to marginalize the opposition,” she says of critics who make the case I’m going to make. “But projects (like the plan for 281) are part of the process. It is one of the first steps. They have a lot of tracks going at once that will intersect into something that’s called the North American Union.”

I still don’t believe it. I still think TTC is a bad idea, but it’s not because Cibolo will be annexed by China and Bill Gates will make Microsoft’s fourth quarter numbers by selling Washington and Idaho to Canadian timber interests.

Come back this afternoon and we’ll discuss the At Large Conspiracy About Conspiracies.

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